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Rebecca Marino not only had the physical qualities that can lead to stardom in professional tennis, she had the game.

Still, all that raw ability and youthful promise amounts to nothing, if the fire is gone. And for the 22-year-old player from Vancouver, the requisite burning desire to be the best, to let nothing stand in her way, to stomp on an opponent's throat, left her some time ago.

The world's 38th ranked women's player in 2011, when she was only 20, Marino announced she was stepping away from tennis Wednesday in a three-pronged media presentation that included a morning news release from Tennis Canada, a teleconference with the national sports media and finally a media availability at the University of B.C. tennis centre with Vancouver broadcasters and reporters who have covered her career.

On Sunday, in a New York Times article, as part of that publication's investigation into a series on sports gambling, she detailed acts of "cyber bullying" on social media in which abusive comments were directed at Marino by vindictive gamblers, after she lost a match and cost them money. Subsequently, she cancelled her Twitter and Facebook accounts.

"It did get to me," she repeated Wednesday. "I wanted to go back at them and defend myself. They speak so insensitively. It makes me wonder, what kind of person are they? To be able to say something about someone they don't know. It's cruel. But I've been told that it was nothing compared to what some other players have had to go through."

Earlier, however, in her national teleconference, Marino made an effort to downplay cyber-bullying as the crux of her issue and instead admitted to depression.

She said she had been battling feelings of heavyheartedness and despair for the past "four to six years." She has sought counseling and been on medication for the past two years. Admitting she was depressed was "the best thing I've ever done", Marino said, and she expressed the hope that, by going public about her malaise, she might convince others to seek out help.

Lisa Northrup, Marino's strength and conditioning coach, nutritionist and travel coordinator, said she began to sense Rebecca had a problem last year when she missed training and had difficulty rousing herself from bed to start the day.

"When you travel with someone, and you're with them 24/7, you begin to sense right away when things aren't right," Northrup explained. "It's not like I was totally caught off guard. Rebecca is an athlete. But first of all, she's a person. It meant (changing her professional role) and just going over to her place to hang with her."

Last March, Marino announced she was taking a sabbatical from tennis to recover from "burnout". For three months, she didn't go near the practice court during a seven-month hiatus. By the time she was ready to return, her world ranking had slipped to No. 426. And she entered a number of lower-level tournaments in an attempt to recover lost ground.

In January, she was ousted from the Australian Open in the first round for the second straight year.

Last week, she was defeated in straight sets in an attempt to qualify for a WTA tournament in Memphis, the same tournament in which she reached the finals just two years ago.

With her career and prospects showing few signs of pulling out of the spiral she made Wednesday's break.

Numerous media questioners, fixated by Marino's cyber-bulling revelations, kept trying to steer her back toward that narrative, even though she kept repeating that it was not her primary reason for dropping out.

Another interrogator keep at her to whittle the whole shebang down to "pressure", and the distorted realities of a professional sports life which force young athletes to travel a long way from who they really are.

In the end, though, there seemed to be no one neat nutshell of an explanation. It was all of the above, and more.

Marino did seem relieved to be done with professional tennis and almost giddy at the prospect of leading a normal life "to go to school and get a job, all that mundane stuff, the daily grind. Yeah, I want to join that. That's something that definitely excites me. I'm kind of living my life the opposite way other people want to live theirs."

The history of women's tennis is littered with dropouts from a variety of physical, personal and emotional issues, from exhaustion to drug use to life-threatening illnesses. Professional tennis is a lonely, insular, narrowly focused existence. Tour life is extremely hard. Disillusionment is rampant.

Still, some dropouts have bounced back and gone on to become top-ranked players, even Grand Slam winners.

That remains a possibility for Marino. And she was careful about declaring she was "stepping back" from tennis while ignoring the R-word (retirement).

But while she didn't confirm it, in her bones she knows that it's over.

"It was different when she was No. 38 in the world," said Marino's agent, Ross Gurney. "But she was away from the sport for seven-nine months, and it cost her so many ranking points. It's not that she dislikes tennis. But she's not prepared to go through the sacrifices and hours it takes to get back to the top 40. Tennis requires such a consuming, physical and emotional investment. It has been her job since she was 14. She can't operate in that space anymore. Now, she's looking for some normalcy, to be like just another 22-year-old. She feels very relieved to be doing that. In essence, she's not coming back."

"I made it to No. 38 in the world," Marino said. "I'm not going to downplay that or forget that. I've been to places in the world I wouldn't have been otherwise. This (tennis) is just one chapter in my life. I have many more things to look forward to."

It isn't so much the tennis she's losing but the cocoon that goes with it. Suddenly, another world is opening up to her.

Wednesday, Rebecca Marino had the look of a young woman being liberated.

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